The Op-Ed's Hidden Agenda

Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville School of Law

Recycling is supposed to be a good thing, so
you'd think that media organizations would be proud when they do it. But in fact, they
tend to keep it quiet.

I'm not talking about aluminum cans here, but about the tendency of media organizations
to turn press releases and written-to-order opinion pieces into apparently objective
accounts. This happens all the time, partly because of media laziness, and partly because
of ingenuity on the part of the various advocacy groups that depend on media coverage to
advance their agendas and promote their fundraising campaigns.

The first part of this formula, media laziness, was demonstrated by journalism students
here at the University of Tennessee a few years ago. They produced a fake press release
for a non-existent student group opposed to political correctness and sent it to various
news organizations.

Some ran the item; some even embellished the report of an event that never happened
with additional details that weren't in the phony press release. None called the contact
number (which was genuine) or did anything else to check its validity. Yet when they were
exposed, their response was to call the experiment "unethical."

Meanwhile an apparent plagiarism scandal at two California newspapers was resolved when
it turned out that the two columnists who published identical columns hadn't copied each
other  they had both simply copied their columns word-for-word from the same press
release. Oh, said the editors. That was OK.

The second part, interest-group ingenuity, is illustrated by the recent efforts by gun
control groups to capitalize on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The first round was a
flop, as Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center tried to bolster an ongoing campaign
against high-powered rifles with bogus claims that the Barrett Arms Company had sold some
of its .50-caliber single-shot rifles to Usama bin Laden. Not many fell for this one,
which gave off a pronounced odor of fish, and The Washington Post even reported,
accurately, that the rifles in question had actually been sold to the United States
government.

But Sarah Brady's "Brady Campaign" (formerly Handgun Control Inc., and before
that the National Coalition to Ban Handguns) took a different tack. In a daring non
sequitur, the Brady Campaign argued that the smashing of two hijacked airlines into large
office buildings clearly made the case for . . . banning gun shows! Or at least for
subjecting every kitchen-table firearms sale among friends to the full requirements of the
National Instant Check System.

Their argument was that "our soldiers could be gunned down by foreign terrorists
armed with firearms purchased at American gun shows." America's "lax" gun
laws, we were told, were going to allow "terrorists to amass their deadly
arsenals."

I've seen the footage of Al Qaeda warehouses full of howitzers, mortars and even tanks,
and it boggles my mind to hear activists claim, or at least imply, that they came from gun
shows. I've been to a few gun shows, and I've never seen even one tank for sale. Nor do I
believe that the Sept. 11 hijackers got their box cutters at a gun show. A lot of other
people must have had the same doubts, because the Brady press release didn't get a lot of
attention.

The next step, however, was an opinion piece in the Post by former Clinton
Justice Department official Eric Holder, who regurgitated the claims made in the Brady
press release and a similar one from the Violence Policy Center. (Guest opinion pieces of
this sort are often "placed" by advocacy groups and PR firms, who frequently
write the pieces themselves, persuade a prominent person to sign on, and then
"shop" the piece to various publications in support of a broader public
relations campaign.)

Some time later, the Post's editorial board picked up the theme, with an
editorial that closely tracked the Holder op-ed and the earlier Brady Campaign and
Violence Policy Center press releases. National Public Radio ran a story that did the
same, though it at least identified the source as anti-gun interest groups. And The
Associated Press ran an item featuring anti-gun lawmakers who cited  you guessed it
 the earlier news and op-ed pieces as proof that new legislation is needed, doing
just what the anti-gun groups want.

This is a common pattern, and once you learn to recognize the signs you'll see it all
over the place: Group issues press release; news stories and op-eds suddenly appear
raising the same issues; and lawmakers pick up on these and "independently"
decide there's a problem, often holding press conferences that generate still more news
coverage until people forget where the story originated. This approach is used by
activists across the spectrum, though it works best for left-leaning groups because
editors and reporters, who tend to share those groups' views, are less likely to
recognize, or care, that they're being used.

While this particular effort to capitalize on fears of terrorism as a means of shoring
up the sagging gun control movement may well fail, it's a useful example in how things
work. (If you want to observe for yourself, just spend a few weeks cruising the Web sites
of groups like Brady, the VPC, the Children's Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and so on,
and comparing the press releases available there with news and opinion coverage for the
same period.) The fact is that mainstream media organizations have been allowing
themselves to be used by activist groups for decades, in ways that they don't fess up to
their readers and viewers.

But there's a price in such behaviors. More and more people are catching on to this
sort of thing, and it may explain why the reputation of traditional media organizations
continues to slide. For while they continue to claim that liberal bias is a myth, an
amazing amount of what traditional media groups do comes straight from the fax machines of
left-leaning advocacy groups. As long as that's the case, their claims to exercise
unbiased editorial judgment are going to ring very hollow.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law
at the University of Tennessee, and writes for the InstaPundit.Com Web site. The
opinions expressed here are his own and do not come from any PR agency or activist group.
Nor does he own a tank.